In 2019, Robin, Elizabeth and I traveled to New York City to see our beloved niece Emily graduate from NYU. That was the biggest thrill of the trip. The second-biggest thrill?

1. Having my favorite skyscraper, the Art Deco Chrysler Building, Just outside our hotel room window?

Nope.

2. Going to a real-live actual Broadway show? (Come from Away, about all the airplanes that had to land in Newfoundland on 9/11 and how Canadians embraced their visitors. It was delightful.)

Nope.

3. Sitting inside Yankee Stadium?

Nope.

4. Riding up to the VERY SPOT at the top of the Empire State Building where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan FINALLY met in Sleepless in Seattle?

Nope.

Okay, I give up. Here it is: We were all walking, Jackoways and Gregorys and Aunt Robin, in the East Village when we passed the Cooper Union.

The COOPER UNION! I started hopping up and down on the sidewalk. I’d done this before, in the midst of what was, I am sure, a thrilling AGHS lecture on the Thirty Years’ War—“BDSF!” I reminded my students; the war’s four stages were Bohemian, Danish, Swedish and French—when I recognized, from a couple of miles away, the sound of a B-17’s engines. It was “Sentimental Journey,” on its way to McChesney Field in San Luis Obispo, just north of us.

I left the classroom and hopped up and down on the lawn between the 200 and 300 wings at Arroyo Grande High School as the plane flew overhead. The squirrels there, who liked to skitter into my classroom for weekend courtship dances while I was grading essays, were a little stunned. So were my students.

And now I was stunned because I was across the street from the Cooper Union. I, happily digesting some Greenwich Village squid-ink pasta–the best I’ve had since an AGHS student trip to Venice– did not know it was there.

On tomorrow’s date in history in 1860, Abraham Lincoln, largely unknown outside the Midwest, delivered the speech inside that building that would make him president.

And now, in 2019, I was standing in front of the Cooper Union. And that is the 1860 photograph, taken in Matthew Brady’s New York studio, that captured Lincoln in the hours before his speech.

You’d look in vain for in the Cooper Union speech for the kind of eloquence that marked the Gettysburg Address or Lincoln’s Inaugurals, but what he said in the Cooper Union–densely reasoned, lawyerly, with every word carefully chosen–was so compelling that many of the jaded New York reporters (some of them, for their lack of homework on the man, might’ve been miffed a little because they’d been assigned to cover this Illinois rube, a little taller than the cornstalks from whence he came) put their pens down and forgot to take notes.

He was that good.

He had arrived, on February 27, 1860.

His death on April 15, 1865, only made it certain that he would never leave us.

Ever since I was a little boy, Lincoln has been alive to me. I have read everything I can about him. I’ve watched every Hollywood depiction of him, most of them hokum. I watched perhaps the hokumiest, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, the other night for the sheer pleasure of being in the television presence of Henry Fonda’s Lincoln.

But it was, finally, the Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis, his research meticulous, who made Lincoln come alive to me. Lewis lived inside the man, as he does all his characters, for months.

Lincoln– and Lewis understood this–would have pronounced the word “care” as “keer;” his voice was thin and reedy but he knew how to project it. Lewis knew how difficult Lincoln’s relationships were with Mary and with Robert, his eldest son. But he also knew how Lincoln could tell a story, sometimes to give himself time to think, or, conversely, how he could choose words that were like knives when he had to wound the obtuse, the wrong-headed or the faint of heart, if only to shock them at the sight of their own blood.

(At Gettysburg, the marathon orator Edward Everett had the decency to admit that Lincoln’s words, in his two-minute speech, had bested his, which lasted two hours. Everett was the main attraction that day in November 1863. Lincoln’s invitation to the battlefield, dusted with lime in the fall, a prophylactic measure that failed to erase the stench of horses unburied since July, was a mere politeness. Lincoln was not popular.)

Best of all, Lewis understood, while we appropriately remember the man’s kindness, that Lincoln had a temper. His will was spun steel and his ambition, as a law partner once remarked, “was a little engine that knew no rest.”

So the best part about the Cooper Union speech might be that Lincoln knew exactly what he wanted to say, knew how he wanted to say it, and all of it, every word, was a servant of his ambition. The nation, on February 27, 1860, was obviously and perhaps irrevocably coming apart.

Only Lincoln knew, from the intuition that he was singular–that insight was perhaps the greatest gift left him by his mother and stepmother–that he had inside reservoirs of such deep strength. They were deep enough to lift the nation to a better place.

That, of course, meant four years of heartbreak and the modern equivalent of 6.6 million deaths.

And I don’t know that we’ve reached that better place yet.

But who could ask for a better guide?

In a scene filmed at the Santa Maria Airport, a B-17 piloted by Steve McQueen takes aim at his British airfield’s control tower. McQueen, as a self-destructive airman in The War Lover (1962), seems to me to have been part of a trend—call it the Cult of Toxic Masculinity.

Toxic masculine films seem to have a theme we need bear in mind: Men are often self-destructive.

McQueen does just that himself in The Cincinnati Kid, where his poker gambler upstart is demolished by Edward G. Robinson’s pro, just as Paul Newman’s is demolished by Jackie Gleason, “Minnesota Fats,” in The Hustler.

This occurred to me yesterday while watching The Blue Max, a 1966 film about German fighter pilots. (The title refers to a medal conferred for twenty kills.) The lead, George Peppard, who’d just finishing rescuing Cat from the rain in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is now a self-destructive Toxic Male in this just-above average film. The flying sequences are still thrilling, and Peppard grounds us in every scene in between. He has a charming, empty smile, cares about no one other than himself, which shows in combat, where he shows no mercy. Even in his scenes with the architecturally impossible, for 1918, Ursula Andress (Richthofen’s red Fokker triplane is prettier), he is emotionally empty.

So you wind up wishing they’d killed him 45 minutes into the film.

Not all 1960s toxic males are as euthanizable at McQueen and Peppard in those two films.

McQueen’s Bullitt is a prime example. After the famed car chase that incinerates two mafioso and a bloody gunfight in the presence of Rome-bound nuns the San Francisco Terminal, and exhausted detective comes home to his apartment and—this with Jacqueline Bisset still warm in his bed—he washes his face, as Pilate did his hands—and looks bleakly at himself in his bathroom mirror. He hates what, and whom, he sees.

Toxic males need not be self-loathing to be toxic. The king of the genre, and one of my favorite actors, must be Paul Newman. His charming road-gang convict in Cool Hand Luke—look at that incredible Newman smile in the still below!— charms every inmate, including the oafish George Kennedy, and the hardboiled egg-eating scene is epic, yet Luke doesn’t seem to mind that he’s killed the bloodhounds trailing his escape, run to death, nor does he care much about his convict friends; he abandons them in the end to trying running way just one more time. Luke is as heroic as Hercules but as empty as an amphora run out of oil.

But it was Newman who perfected the Toxic Male in an earlier film, Hud, as a sociopathic Texas rancher who brutalizes his father, his lover, Patricia Neal, who drives a convertible Cadillac, womanizes in Toxic Male ways that enchant his young nephew, played by Brandon de Wilde (whom I could’ve cheerfully strangled for his bleating in Shane), and drinks more hard liquor in a weekend than Dallas does in a fiscal year.

De Wilde, thank god, outgrows Shane and finally learns to become a man by turning on Uncle Hud, so empty and so suddenly weak. He has no more substance than a tumbleweed.

Here, I think is where the great director Peter Bogdanovich and the even-greater writer Larry McMurtry arrive with The Last Picture Show (1971), a film I hated for years until I became a grownup. It’s full of Toxic Males: the oafish Randy McQuaid is an oafish predator whose fondest wish in life is the see Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges’ sometime girlfriend, naked. Bridges is mostly inarticulate yet somehow appealing. He’s a football hero who has forever reached his limits. I think the movie belongs most to Timothy Bottoms, who wants to be a good man but, as a teenager, beds his despondent football coach’s wife (Cloris Leachman, who is, in a performance that won her an Oscar, incredible) but finally pursues, and wins, Cybill Shepherd, the object of every boy’s desire.

She betrays him within five minutes’ screentime.

The film ends with the accidental killing of a special-needs boy, one of Bottoms’s longtime friends, Bottoms unleashes deep reservoirs of anger. It should be a depressing moment, but it isn’t. The character, Sonny Crawford, has suddenly discovered that he deeply cared for someone other than himself. The fact that he’s almost ready to kill for his lost friend means that he’s escaped the toxic masculinity that doomed character like Hud.

When Elizabeth and I drove through dying Maricopa a few weeks ago, I recognized instantly the town McMurtry wrote about. There was an abandoned coffee shop with a barstool counter; you could almost imagine a teenager like Sonny swiveling in his tool, restless from the two teaspoons of sugar in his coffee, until, you hope, he twists his hips suddenly—almost violently—and bolts out the coffee shop door, never to return.